Following one man's task of building a virtual world from the comfort of his pajamas. Discusses Procedural Terrain, Vegetation and Architecture generation. Also OpenCL, Voxels and Computer Graphics in general.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Like every year or so, comet Euclideon comes close to us and we get to see what they have been working on. Here is a video they posted a couple of days ago:

As usual, the technology is brilliant and quite interesting. It is still similar to what Nvidia and Olick were able to show a long time ago, but nevertheless a significant feat of engineering. I am just having trouble reconciling the narrator's discourse with what we see on screen.

I was hoping they would tone down the hype in the future. They however named this video "The World's Most Realistic Graphics". I wonder which World they are talking about. In planet Earth, 2014, pretty much any AAA game looks better and runs faster than this.

I'm not sure why they would go and compare themselves to engines like UE4 when everybody knows UE4 will produce far better looking graphics. Same for CryENGINE and even Unity. It is not enough you say it looks better, it has to look better. Jedi tricks do not work over YouTube.

The "conspiracy of fools" aspect is also interesting. The true sign of genius is to see all fools conspiring against you. Somewhere in this video the narrator points that many experts around the web were very critical of the tech. These are the fools. That they got so many fools to speak against them must surely mean they are geniuses.

Well we know it does not work like that. Sometimes the fools just go against other fools. Being criticized does not make you right. Now in this video they claim they have proven all the fools wrong. That has yet to happen. The burden of proof is on them.

I had some secret hopes for this tech to be applied to games, but the tech gap is growing every year. Let's see what happens next year, when the comet approaches us again.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

We recently developed an extension model for Voxel Studio and Voxel Farm in general. The idea is you should be able to come up with entirely custom procedural content without having to recompile any of the tools, and even your final EXE if you like.

You can achieve this by wrapping your custom code inside an extension. During world design time, Voxel Studio is able to load your extension and allows you to input whatever configuration parameters you have chosen for it. Then, during runtime, the same extension code runs thus guaranteeing you get the same results you saw inside Voxel Studio.

Let's follow a quick example. Imagine we have developed a small scene in Voxel Studio using the default terrain component. At this point we have interacted only with the vanilla settings, so our scene looks like this:

Note this is only terrain, it does not contain other layers like rock and tree instancing, but it should be enough for this example.

Now let's say we want to add a massive sphere somewhere in the image. While we could go in edit mode and add a sphere using a voxel brush, this would set a lot of voxels. Since we know this will be a perfect sphere we can save a lot of data if we just store the center and radius and produce the voxels on the fly. Voxel Studio does not include a layer like that out of the box, but we can create it ourselves. Here is how:

Voxel Studio in Windows OS can load extension DLLs at runtime. You can develop the DLL in any form you like as long as the few required entry-points are found. The first few are functions so Voxel Studio and Voxel Farm in general can ask the extension what parameters it wants to capture. And then there is one function that will return the voxel data for a given chunk of space.

So we create a new DLL project. Just by dumping the binary DLL in the extension folder, Voxel Studio should be able to find it and allow us to use it for a new voxel layer:

Here our extension has identified itself as "Mega Sphere". Clicking on it will add it to the list of voxel layers in the tree.

We then define four properties for the sphere: origin x, origin y, origin z and radius. Exposing property metadata is what allows Voxel Studio to create editors for the extension without really knowing what they are and how they will be used:

Now comes the real work. So far it was mostly about metadata, let's see how we get actual voxels out of the extension. It comes down to implementing a function that looks like this:

bool
getVoxels(

char*
object,

VoxelFarm::CellIdcell,

doublecellOrigin[3],

doublecellSize,

doublevoxelSize,

intblockSize,

VoxelFarm::VoxelType*
changeFlags,

VoxelFarm::MaterialId*
materials,

VoxelFarm::Algebra::Vector*
vectors,

bool&
empty)

I will not go into the implementation this time, but the overall idea is this function is expected to fill the material, vector and flag 3D buffers with voxel data. The requested region of space is defined by cellOrigin and cellSize.

Once we code this to output a sphere, we are finally able to refresh our render view and see the results:

Here you can see some spheres. The one in the last image has a 10 km radius. Naturally we could have developed a more interesting layer, for instance a meteorite impact zone or ore veins, but hopefully you get the idea.

One last thing: Using native code for extensions always brings up the issue of security. We debated this for a while when designing the system. We finally chose to use DLLs just because they allow to run native code without penalty. You can get really close to the metal. The security aspect can be managed by certification, also by running the DLL in a lower OS integrity mode, thus restricting the kind of access it would have over the system. And of course you can always have a DLL extension you trust that acts as a wrapper for code you do not trust, but runs in Lua or some other form of application language where you are certain it can be contained.

Sunday, September 7, 2014

We are working to make Voxel Farm accessible for a bigger crowd. Among other things we are easing Unity integration and improving our tools. Here is a teaser of the new Voxel Studio application, showing some terrain building:

We removed a lot of the complexity from the old Voxel Studio. No need to set up or connect to a render Voxel Farm anymore for instance.

The tool allows you to work on the macro features of your world like terrain, lakes, caves, architecture, then to jump in and edit the voxels directly. We will be showing more of that in the future.